by Bill Granger
Cernan sat down in the wooden chair across from them. His face was flat and his eyes looked sewn on. “Who is this one?”
“An American agent,” Ready said. “I had no choice.” He smiled. “He wants to know what happened to his friend.”
“It is of no business to him,” said Cernan. The words were flat, careful, polished to serve the greatest amount of meaning with the fewest sounds.
“It is my business that you have not returned to Prague,” Ready said.
“No. You are in a mistake,” Cernan said. “You have no more business with me.”
“But you came.”
“I came,” Cernan agreed.
Colonel Ready stared at him. “That is extraordinary enough for me to ask you why.”
“I will ask: Why do you signal me?”
“To show Mr. Mason that you have Devereaux and the girl. You have the girl, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Cernan said.
“Where?” Mason said.
They ignored him. They glanced at him because he had made a sound but they ignored him. Ready was smiling.
Cernan said, “What do you want?”
“I want to buy her.”
Cernan blinked. It was the only sign he made. He said, “Why do you want her?”
“That is my business. I can offer a fair price.”
“No. Not at the moment. Perhaps never.”
“But you came here.”
“I am always curious,” Cernan said.
“You have her, though she could not have tracked you down. I was on her trail, Cernan, I was this far behind her. Give me a day more and I would have had her. How did you get her, Cernan? You weren’t linked to the train, so you must’ve lured her to you.”
Then Ready grinned because he understood: “She thought it was me. She would do that, she was good enough for that. Even brave enough.”
Cernan nodded his head. His brown eyes glittered again in the soft Flemish light, which was diffused and yellowed and reminiscent of a dim Vermeer painting. Mason sat apart from them and listened. He held the pistol in his coat pocket with the safety off.
Cernan listened. When Ready paused, he did not volunteer a sound.
“Devereaux is loose,” Ready said. He said it without inflection. He said it with a sort of wonder and then grinned. “The bastard got away. You let him loose.”
“He is employed.”
The word was curious. Mason felt he was losing ground. “Where is he? Where is Rita?”
Cernan finally noticed him. “Are you so foolish to be with this man? This man would kill you like a fly. You are young, which is a reason at least for your foolishness.”
David Mason did not blush. He felt the weight of the pistol in his hand.
“I have a piece,” he said.
“Good,” Cernan said. “Hold on to it. Are you going to shoot me in this public tavern? Are you going to shoot both of us? Pah.” It was a sound of dismissal. He turned back to Ready.
“Where is he?” Ready asked.
“Why must I tell you anything? You are not yet of the Secret Service, are you, Colonel? You had something to sell and you were paid your price. That is all the concern you are to me.”
“What can he do for you that I can’t do for you?”
“You have no…” Cernan hesitated, looking for the word.
“The girl. I want the girl. What do you want me to do for the girl?”
“Do you have friends in America?”
“Many,” Ready said.
Cernan considered. He looked at David Mason, as though seeing him for the first time. “You. What are you? CIA.”
Mason said nothing.
Ready grinned. “Tell him, son. We’re all professionals here. He’s with Section.”
“So if my agent fails, I can take him back to Prague with me.”
“No problem,” said Colonel Ready.
Mason did not feel fear or even anger. He felt a curious sense of being apart, of stumbling into something so deep and wide that he would have to fall for a long time before touching anything or striking the bottom.
“If a child disappears, who takes her?”
“In the States, you mean?” Ready said. “Kidnappers.”
“Agencies of government?”
“Unlikely. How was it done?”
“They kill her keeper, break into her house, take her. They ask nothing for her.”
“Then they want to signal someone or make a bargain with someone. A trade. Tit for tat, Cernan.”
“That is what I think,” he said. His voice was very soft. “He told me: Ask Miki, Ask Miki. So I ask Miki and now Miki is persuaded to tell me. Miki say: Perhaps it is these people because he knows what these people do. So: Do you know these people?”
“Who are these people?” Colonel Ready said.
“People in America. Certain people.”
“I understand,” Ready said. “Yes. That makes sense.”
“What are you talking about?” David Mason said.
Cernan sighed and looked at Colonel Ready. “You want to see Miss Macklin? Then come with me. Perhaps if you succeed where the American agent fails, you can win your prize, Colonel.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” Mason said.
“What are you going to do, sir, shoot me?” Cernan said. He got up and scraped his chair across the tile floor.
Mason got up. He thought about it. Could he shoot someone in a tavern in the middle of a Belgian city? And he realized he could not. He followed Cernan and Ready out the door. The sun broke through and dazzled the rain on the cobblestones. Buses and cars and bicycles poured into the square from the spiderweb of narrow streets beyond. A large Mercedes-Benz was parked in the square. They walked to the car and the rear door opened. He decided.
He pushed Colonel Ready into Cernan’s back and the two men tumbled into the car and David Mason had the piece out. He had decided to join the party by force but it was a little clumsy. He didn’t even feel the policeman’s club land on his head, behind his left ear.
30
ILLUSIONS OF FAITH
Big Ben Herguth felt cold. New York always made him feel that way. In fact, every place except Southern California made him feel that way.
The day was bright but deep shadows painted all the crosstown streets, and it was chilled in the shade. Every time he had to go to New York, there was more shade. He wore the houndstooth jacket that made him look even bigger than he was. His shirt collar was open and he wore a chain around his size-twenty-two neck.
The limo dumped him—it felt like getting dumped—in front of the seventy-three-story smoked-glass and prerusted steel building that served as network headquarters. The noise of New York was all around him, a pounding noise that would give him a headache after a couple of hours and would only be soothed by a pitcher of martinis and a twenty-two-year-old piece of ass. He hated New York: People didn’t walk, they loped. And New York was where Julie was. Herguth felt cold and a little afraid every time Julie summoned him.
There were two outer offices, and when he got to the inner sanctum on the forty-ninth floor he felt out of breath, as though he had walked up all those stairs. The room was completely silent save for the occasional interruption of a wa-wa-wa ambulance sound.
Jules Bergen was sitting on a couch and he was studying photographs.
“Hello, Ben,” he said. He did not look up from the photographs. Ben Herguth kept his distance, remained on the other side of the immense room.
“Get yourself a drink,” Jules Bergen said. The voice was distracted. “This is really good work, this last batch.”
“Is that Anna?”
“Yes. I said I wanted her naked this time. She is terribly developed for someone fourteen. Did I mention I had a ten-year-old in here last week, she was sent over by one of the agencies? She was very professional, she spoke well. She wanted to sit on my lap after a while. Sometimes I’m tempted. But right in the office… How would it look?”
“
It wouldn’t look good,” Ben Herguth said. He made a double Beefeater on the rocks. He drank it down like medicine. He made another. Jules Bergen only drank Perrier.
“You seen these?”
“Sure,” Ben said. He had collected them. He was Julie’s collector, among other things. Make a run down to Mexico now and then, get a bunch of spic kids, take the stills and sometimes the videotapes. He wasn’t really interested in the little boys though. He made that clear. He liked the girls without body hair.
“How is Anna?” Jules asked.
“I talked to the keepers, she’s learning the rules. She keeps quiet, she doesn’t pull no shit like that screaming shit she was doing.”
“They aren’t molesting her?”
“No. Just the pictures you wanted.”
“Yes.” Jules had a dreamy look in his vacant, blue eyes. He was the second most powerful man in television. He owned production companies, was a movie producer by proxy, owned stars and their contracts, owned twenty-three percent of the stock of the network, owned fine paintings. Owned as much as a man can own. He liked little girls just on the lip of puberty. It was a discreet passion—almost a hobby—for a man as powerful as Jules Bergen.
Ben prowled the room. The carpet was gray and deep enough to sleep on. Books on the walls, respectable titles. Television monitors. The trappings of power. A photograph of the President with his arm around Jules.
Ben Herguth stood in front of Jules and looked down and saw the photograph of Anna standing naked in the middle of a dim little room with her sex organ exposed and her hands at her sides. She looked sad. Maybe even frightened.
“Skoal,” Ben said and took another swig. Being with Julie made him want to drink.
“What is happening?” Jules said, staring at the second picture of Anna.
“Willis from Langley drops a dime, says some guy from this fucking R Section is in the country. Just a word to the wise. I told the keepers to watch themselves. I got four guys in that house on the kid, they got no trouble. Willis is still telling me he’s trying to find out where the fuck Miki is. Miki is not in Prague, definitely, but no one is making a deal for him right now. Fucking CIA, these guys are like spies in comic books.”
“And Al. Did you look into Al?”
“Al Buck had a visitor. He doesn’t say he did but he did. He was fifty minutes late going into the station. Someone had a talk with him. He don’t want to talk about it, so I figure it has to do with this business.”
“Kay Davis?”
“Yeah, I figure the certain someone had a talk with her, too. I figure that Kay has got to come to no good end, you know?”
“Be careful this time, Ben.” Jules looked up, a small sharp look of annoyance on his face. “I don’t want that mistake repeated. I had to call Al twice in one day, once to promote her, which that idiot didn’t understand, once to rehire her. It annoys me to have to repeat myself, Ben, to cover my tracks. You’re supposed to cover tracks.”
“I’m sorry, Julie, I swear to God it won’t happen again.”
Ben was almost white in the face. The tan didn’t help and the martinis didn’t help.
Jules had small hands and a precise way of speaking. He pursed his lips and stared at Ben standing before him. Then his look softened. “When this is over, I want you to go to Mexico again.”
“You got it, Julie, you tell me when. You tell me, you got it.”
Jules nodded. “I know, Ben.” He studied Anna’s nakedness. “Fix Kay when you can.”
“I’ll fix her.”
“The problem, the central problem, remains. Miki knows. Miki knows us and about CIA and everything. No one should know that much.”
“No.”
“A man was sent out to pick Miki up. He went and he’s not been heard from for nearly five days. Henkin hasn’t made contact with me since he told me to take in the little girl. The girl was the illegitimate daughter of the agent he sent. I don’t presume to understand how these things work in Prague; Henkin has every incentive to get rid of Miki, perhaps more than we do. Miki knows and Miki has to carry what he knows to a shallow grave. If Henkin is indecisive in this, we are going to have to decide for him. I want Miki dead before November is over.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Contact Willis. I want the name of an absolutely reliable contractor. Money is no object, of course. If Henkin can’t act, we will have to act. At least Henkin knows where Miki is supposed to be, which is more than Willis or the Langley Firm know.”
Ben licked his lips to get rid of the dry, sour taste.
“What about the little girl?” he said at last.
“We took her for leverage. Obviously, if we find Miki—or if Henkin can act in time—the need for leverage is over.”
Ben thought it was going to be that way from the beginning. It didn’t affect him one way or another. He shrugged inside his big sports coat.
“Willis said in L.A. that Langley is putting fifteen million dollars on Life,” Herguth said.
“That’s a substantial sum. How can we mule for them this time?”
“The laundry is coming out of Credit Suisse in Zurich as well as two suitcases we mule direct into Prague. The arrangements are all made. The big assault on Moscow has room for every extra we could lay our hands on and we got a lot of Czech Army volunteers. The money is substantial for them, for doing what they like to do anyway, which is run around shooting their guns off. It’s going to be a nice film, Julie.”
“It’s going to be another overpriced piece of shit,” Jules Bergen said. “I like your enthusiasm, Ben. It comes from living in California. But I can afford to see things as they are. Life of Napoleon is a preordained piece of shit, crammed together by burned-out, sold-out people between coke breaks, starring a substantial cast of people without a wit of talent, mouthing meaningless lines. It’ll make us richer than we already are. I like the action, Ben, don’t get me wrong. It’s like looking at these pictures. They interest me, seeing her naked like this. But I wouldn’t want to see her. Not as she really is. I like the illusion of action. You give me that, Ben. You are the supreme fixer, the ultimate wired man. Your talent is in your enthusiasm.”
Ben felt put down but that was the way Julie was. He was not used to it exactly, but it had happened often enough not to put Ben in a sulk for days.
Jules was enjoying himself. “Because I’m a patriot, my country permits me to steal. Because I’m the president of a great television network, my lies are made into gospels. I am as fake as… as that miracle in Chicago, but if I said tomorrow that I was not a patriot and not a great man, no one would believe me because their religion is already in place, Ben.”
“Yeah, Julie,” Ben said because Julie was getting wound up.
Jules smiled at him. His eyes were mellow and kind. “I really like you, Ben. I like what we’re doing. I like everything except that Miki is still alive and not dead. How long will it take to make him dead, Ben?”
“I don’t know. I’ll do it as fast as I can.”
“Do it fast, Ben,” Jules said.
“You know I will.”
Jules sighed. He touched one of the photographs. “Poor little girl with her weeping statues and miracles. Do you suppose she still believes in miracles, Ben? Do you suppose she is praying right now to the statue to rescue her? Do you think she knows she is going to die?”
Ben said, “I don’t know, Julie.”
“Find out, will you?” He looked at the photographs and touched them with his fingertips. “Find out for me. I like to know how long the illusion lasts. I mean, when you are naked and afraid and you know that nothing is going to save you ever again, do you finally give up on the illusion?” He paused, thinking of it. “Or maybe it just becomes so much stronger.”
31
THE SLAVIC SOUL
He was a large man with the eyes of a saint. He came off the plane through the connecting tube to the terminal, looked left and right, and then started down the concourse. He sa
w the man waiting for him on the other side of the security barrier. The other man was as he always had been: gray, pale, cold. Denisov shivered and went to meet him.
Denisov said, “You are too much the stranger to your own country.”
“I’m glad the country treats you well.”
“It is well,” Denisov said. He didn’t smile. His eyes stared at Devereaux through the rimless spectacles. The spectacles were his last link with his own past. They reminded him of Moscow and the dark winter nights and the old wife and the lumpy bed and the clamor in the kitchen and the smell of vodka and the music of Tchaikovsky in the park. That had been his past and it had no link to the present except for the man who walked with him down the main concourse to the cocktail lounge between two terminals.
They did not speak to each other as they walked. They walked as old friends but they were old enemies. Denisov had become the reluctant defector one night in Florida when he had lost the last game to Devereaux. He had grown accustomed to his exile. He had money, even friends, but the Moscow nights haunted him in winter and remembered scenes of his past made him hurt and made him recall the pain Devereaux had inflicted upon him by forcing his defection.
“What about the information?”
“To business? Then. So. I am accustomed to American manners.” He opened his briefcase and put it down on the bar.
They were in the Crossroads Lounge that connected the departure floors of Terminals One and Two at O’Hare. Beyond the window wall, planes boomed and struggled aloft and came down at a frightening pace—one every fifteen seconds. The afternoon sky was still brilliant with sunlight and the air beyond the lounge carried the sweet, nostalgic smell of diesel fuel. They were two business travelers who met for a moment and shared a drink at the most anonymous bar in the world.
Denisov spoke: “Jules Bergen is a wealthy man and he runs a wealthy conglomerate. There is no other kind, I think. It is a large company with extensive assets including the license to five television stations, agreements with a hundred and ninety-four affiliates, radio stations, a record company, two casino hotels in Atlantic City—”